Flash has the capacity but not yet the price for mainstream adoption
LaCie’s Little Disk teaches a good lesson to prognosticators of flash memory-based storage devices: it takes more than capacity to make a storage product sell.
Flash and SSD have been media darlings lately, with wild-eyed predictions of the demise of disk drives by many in the industry. The reality is that technology transitions like this take decades, not years, to play out.
A dual technology strategy (disk and SSD) makes great business sense. Obviously Samsung is actively pursuing both flash and spinning media today. Seagate is on the same path.
Flash is still not much more than a twinkle in the eye of the storage industry. It’s exciting, not yet ready for wide-scale adoption. This great comment from Engadget’s post sums it up nicely.
It’s not the specs that drive storage device adoption; it’s having the right price for those specs.
I couldn’t agree more. To quote Paul Saffo, “Never mistake a clear view for a short distance.”